Early September illustrations, travel...and snowflakes

The past few months have been a divergent path from what we had imagined for Spring and Summer of 2020. Regardless of your habits, things changed, some of them major, some minor. 

 

I realized recently that I'm very good at inadvertently making my Covid mask bands pull my ears forward so that I look like Jim Carrey in "Dumb & Dumber". 

 

With regard to seeing friends, out of state family members, and continuing work or school, things have not been as much fun for most people. 

Despite all of that, my daughter is physically back at college, in an illustration and animation program run by a group of former Disney and Warner Brothers artists. She is very fortunate, (in my view) to be enrolled at a university with in-class instruction going on now. For the sort of thing she's learning,  (character design, life drawing, illustration and animation techniques) in-person, hands-on instruction is important. After three weeks of classes, her university's Covid cases are extremely low and it seems to be working well. Fingers crossed that it continues.

 

 

We saw the contrast to other universities, like the University of Colorado in our home town of Boulder. While taking our daughter back to college, we made a visit to my alma mater, the University of Illinois in Champaign-Urbana. The campus was much quieter than usual for mid August with Covid concerns. 

 

Prior to that, we carefully planned and celebrated a birthday for my Mom, including my brother and his family. My Mom had not seen anyone in months, except for a few delivery people and neighbors. There was some risk involved but we did our to best mitigate that and as my Mother said, nearly complete isolation is miserable, and this visit revived her spirits.

 

 

What matters most in life? We spent several magnificent days reminding ourselves of just that, and we agreed that it was much needed for all of us. Several weeks later, we can say we pulled it off...safely.

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With the important stuff covered, I thought I'd share a few of the things from the studio. I am fortunate to have plenty of book illustration projects and advertising work...here are a few recent highlights:

 I had a great deal of fun illustrating and writing humor for the new book Humanocracy, and blogged about it a few months back. It was just published and  released by Harvard Business Review Press. 
It is currently a Wall Street Journal and Amazon Business bestseller, and I know that
 the two authors are excited to see how it resonates with reader.

 

 

 

 

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One of over a dozen illustrations for a book written by a Xerox Corp. executive.
 ...illustrating something that has been slowly returning to offices, after being notably missing
 over the past few months of Covid-19: The rush for the door at 5:00.

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A cartoon for a newspaper in Encinitas California. I've always wanted to draw Nancy Pelosi as a

parrot. (I wonder if she's telling Gavin Newsome about a special salon where he can get his big hair shampooed, cut and blown out - despite all California hair salons being closed.)

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I had a chance to work with one of my favorite authors again in August. This was a second book project for a prominent guitarist and guitar instructor, this time encompassing 20 book illustrations. The manuscript is very creative, with several methods for overcoming creative obstacles that  apply to many artistic endeavors. The author is a pleasure to work with, and when it is published I'll share a link here.